Trending: Where we’re underwater

With 42 percent of homes underwater in the city of Bridgeport, the Park City has the nation’s tenth-highest concentration of homes worth less than what is owed on their mortgages. But Bridgeport isn’t the only local spot that’s drowning.

“There are millions of people around the country who are underwater, but they’re not randomly distributed,” said Occidental College Professor Peter Dreier.

Dreier, who focuses on politics as well as urban and environmental policy, recently published the study that named Bridgeport as the city with the 10th highest saturation of these underwater homes in the nation; his analysis also found that Hartford has the highest concentration of all the nation’s cities. While Bridgeport was the only southwestern Connecticut city to make Dreier’s Top 100 list for the nation’s hardest-hit cities, there are pockets of southwestern Connecticut that rival the rates of many of those areas.

Of course, in order to have underwater mortgages, homes must first be mortgaged — and not all owner-occupied homes are. Nationally, 67.1 percent of houses have a mortgage, and most of the 32 towns in southwestern Connecticut have even higher percentages:

To learn more about how underwater homes affect your neighborhood, pick up a copy of the paper this week and read the full localized Trending.